The entrenchment of data networking into the routines of modern society, as evidenced by the prevalence of the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web, has placed ever-growing demands on service providers to continually improve network performance and user response time. To meet this challenge, service providers have invested heavily in upgrading their networks to increase system capacity (i.e., bandwidth). In many circumstances, such upgrades may not be feasible economically or the physical constraints of the communication system does not permit simply “upgrading.” Accordingly, service providers have also invested in developing techniques to optimize the performance of their networks. Furthermore, mobility of devices have posed further challenges in that the handover procedure involving the transition from one network (or service area) into another network typically require tearing down existing connections and establishing new ones. Such reestablishment of connections is expensive, in terms of signaling overhead and delay.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that provides efficient treatment of connections during handovers.